Foreword Julianne Pierce of VNS Matrix

Thirty years ago, four Australian artists wrote a rambling stream-ofconsciousness text with inspirations ranging from French feminist theory and the cyberpunk writings of William Gibson to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto.” © After several edits and with much of that first draft ending up on the cutting room floor, the group, VNS Matrix, released their A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, © an early declaration of the concept, idea, and rupture that was cyberfeminism, in 1991. This early utterance, generated during a hot South Australian summer, spread and grew gradually, coursing through the international networks via fax, print, and slow dial-up internet. In time, it reached the writer and academic Sadie Plant ©22 in the UK who, serendipitously, had also been naming cyberfeminism. What first emerged as a critique on two opposite sides of the world was soon to grow into a rhizomatic web of connections, conversations, and calls to action. A next wave of feminism, informed by the burgeoning techno-culture and female response, was being seeded in the matrix, a powerful and potent liminal feminine space. Cyberfeminism captured the imaginations of many who were already thinking about the impacts of technology and cyberculture. Like Haraway’s cyborg, this rising cohort had been rallying against the military-industrial complex, wary of the emergent techno-patriarchy, and saw the introduction of cyberfeminism as marking an opportunity to critique and undermine digital capitalism. It also, they noticed, made way for the infiltratation of cyberspace with poetic, feminized, and queer interventions. An energetic burst of activity in the cyberfeminism orbit then took shape, launching decades of disruption. In a matter of a few years from the early to mid-1990s, the German performance group -Innen disrupted technology conferences, Allucquére (Sandy) Rosanne Stone enchanted us with tactile electronic imaginings, © the Old Boys Network @® presented the First Cyberfeminist International, Gc and the FACES mailing list CD was formed.

Around the same time, other networks that focused on technical literacy emerged elsewhere around the globe. In 1994, Flame/Flamme: Sisters On-Line 5 formed as a network of African women online committed to strengthening the capacity of women through technology. In 2000, WOUGNET (Women of Uganda Network) G2 was initiated as an NGO to I

ensure a society in which women are empowered through the use of ICTs for sustainable development.

From these early beginnings, cyberfeminism has stretched its tendrils far and wide. The significant achievement of cyberfeminism is that it brought diverse groups and individuals together to imagine what a cyberfeminist future might be. With these achievements, however, also came acknowledgments that cyberfeminism was a realm of privilege, with those from Europe, Australia, and the United States able to travel, move freely, and connect with one another, and some from elsewhere less able. Writers such as Maria Fernandez @5 and Radhika Gajjala Gs have spoken about the ways in which cyberfeminism has failed to address or engage with postcolonial thinking on racism and cultural identity. Still, as evidenced by the astonishing Cyberfeminism Index, thirty years of cyberfeminism has seen the evolution of a shape-shifting entity, molded and refabricated by those who give their voice and energy to carry iton across time and space, and by those who voice and respond to such critiques. Over the years, it has moved beyond the conceptual and limited to become an ever-expanding network, giving artists, activists, hackers, and thinkers space to meet with each other, to debate, and to experiment with language, ideas, culture, and politics. Its strength and resilience lies in its ability to morph and change through the actions of those who identify as cyberfeminists, and also of those who challenge its purpose and validity.

Cyberfeminism today has as its antecedents an art movement, a performance, a visual metaphor, and a creative network. It was never meant to be a campaign or a defining manifesto. It does not claim to be a political system with acolytes; rather it is a fluid, non-specific, hybrid changeling. It was born in the spirit of collaboration, defiance, and disruption. It is a hex and incantation that summons up the dissident spirit of chaos and the transformative powers of language, systems, webs, and performance. Like the first and second waves of feminism before it, cyberfeminism is part of a continuum of agitation, theory, and action that seeks emancipation from systems of power and control. Its lineage has extended far beyond a critique of techno culture, into forms such as Glitch Feminism 22) and Xenofeminism, ©22 which rethink gender, identity, the 8

body, and boundaries delineating or separating all three. What is celebrated in these ever-shifting and emergent feminisms is the power of the radical voice that brings alternative spaces and visions into being. This is not a monetized orfetishized disruption—this is disruption that at its core smashes, burns, and rebuilds. It is precisely this kind of force and imagination that the Cyberfeminism Index celebrates. Bringing together several years of research, correspondence, conversations, and plain hard work, the resources gathered here by Mindy Seu are testament to a true cyberfeminism for the twenty-first century, and to a vast network of global provocateurs and change agents who offer their lived experiences and aspirations to invoke a space and to demand radical transformation. In identifying so many poetic, provocative, and powerful ideas, thoughts, and actions, this catalogue acknowledges the past and heralds the future.

Julianne Pierce is an artist, producer, curator and writer working across performance, visual arts, and media arts. She has made significant contributions to digital culture in Australia and internationally in various leaderShip roles, including as Chair of Emerging and Experimental, Australia Council for the Arts and Chair of ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art). She is a founding member of the influential cyberfeminist artist group VNS Matrix, which formed in 1991 and continue to have their work included in significant exhibitions and publications worldwide. Jullanne lives and works in Adelaide/Tarntanya on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, South Australia.

==> picture [8 x 15] intentionally omitted <==

----- Start of picture text -----
9
----- End of picture text -----

Introduction Mindy Seu

Cyberfeminism is a mutating word with a nebulous history. Its evolution is less a single root system with multiple branches than a network of entangled rhizomes, constantly and multidirectionally moving. Virginia Barrett of the Australian art collective VNS Matrix has described cyberfeminism as “anti-genealogical, anti-authorial, and a hostile mucus, never faithful to any origins.”

Through its history, cyberfeminism has often been defined by what it is expressly not. @® Coined in the early 1990s by the British cultural theorist Sadie Plant @22) and VNS Matrix, the word “cyberfeminism” takes on its prefix “cyber’—recast from Cybernetics, a 1948 book by Norbert Wiener, and “cyberspace,” from William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer—as a provocation. The word initially stood for a critique of the sci-fi landscapes of the 1980s, stocked with and characterized by cyberbabes and fembots. It denoted the ways various women and marginalized communities were imagining how a reoriented cyberspace could look. By now, three decades after its origination, cyberfeminism has shifted from a loose artistic movement exploring the emancipatory potential of cyberspace toward a collective drive to provide software, hardware, and wetware education and to get marginalized groups online. Today, with questions of technology more and more clearly “bound together with questions of ecology and the economy,” ~~@:5~~ the term is self-reflexive: technology is not only the subject of cyberfeminism, but its means of transmission. It's all about feedback. Rooted as it is by feminism, cyberfeminism is a complicated umbrella term. The history of feminism is dominated by Western attitudes, which makes it exclusionary. Still, the combination of cyber and feminism allows newcomers to quickly connote its meaning while including its relatives Cyberfeminism 2.0, Black cyberfeminism, Arab cyberfeminism, xenofeminism, post-cyber feminism, glitch feminism, Afrofuturism, hackfeministas, transhackfeminism, tlie] O| [netfemi], and @D 24X52F [feminist voices], @D among others. Though several directories of cyberfeminism have already been published, none have gathered the quantity of work, history, breadth of media, or global reach of the index you hold in your hands. While cyberfeminism will continue to shift and evolve, this index is an asymptotic attempt to take stock of how cyberfeminists have continued, over the past 11

three decades, to counter the hegemonic web, and to suggest how they might continue to do so. When | began building this index, | read seminal techno-critical texts to scrape their bibliographies and citations. This branched out to an overwhelming degree. Even after | felt confident that | had gathered a comprehensive list of theoretical texts, Judy Malloy recommended that | distinguish between YACK and HACK, or, respectively, theory and practice. YACK | collected by reading. HACK | collected through conversations with generous people who told me their stories and referred me to others. With their invaluable help, | learned of hackerspaces, digital-rights activist groups, 2 DIY (do it yourself) teledildonics manuals, DIWO (do it with others) organizations, 2D bio-hacktivists, data dominatrixes, @) and open-source estrogen pioneers. Eventually, what first emerged as an open-source, open-access, crowd-sourced spreadsheet became an online database: ~~cyberfeminismindex.com.~~ The design of the website was guided by two primary questions: How do we visualize citations? How do websites age? Anchored by a glowing green “submit” button, the index received submissions from hundreds of people to whom | am deeply grateful. | have long been a gatherer. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin posits the first technological tool as the basket, not the spear, thereby recasting the first protagonist as a gatherer, not a hunter. Not only did this address the deeply gendered roles of these two parts, it reframed our history of technology and changed the singular hero to the plural collective, from he to we. Gathering, for Le Guin, is not a masculine, techno-utopian process of disruption or of moving fast and breaking things, but the methodical, deep labor that comes from “looking around, rather than looking ahead,” from gathering rather than hunting. When Laura Coombs, the designer of this book, pointed out the byline for the book Pleasure Activism (2019), “written and gathered by adrienne maree brown,” | began to see myself in the term “gatherer’” and its use. For this reason, the byline of this publication uses “gathered” as well. As a container, it is more than just the sum of its parts; the book is the site around which its public forms, and a place in which to gather that public.

� Still, as a compilation of a wide sample of techno-critical works,

==> picture [310 x 252] intentionally omitted <==

----- Start of picture text -----
)
:
.
8
----- End of picture text -----

Contributing to Indigenous Futurism Skawennati

Skawennati makes art that addresses history, the future, and change from her perspective as an urban Kanien’keha:ka woman and as a cyberpunk avatar. Her machinimas, textile work, and sculpture have been presented internationally. She co-directs Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a research-creation network based at Concordia University in Montreal. If cyberfeminism is a theorizing, critiquing, exploring, and remaking of the internet, then it is what | have been trying to do since the late 1990s, but with a particular focus on Indigenizing cyberspace—though “Indigenizing” was certainly not a term that | knew back then. Most of the entries | selected for this collection are either my own work or work that | have done in collaboration with individuals and collectives over the years. They are my community! There were very few of us Indigenous artists interested in digital art or the internet at the time, and we few ended up being invited to a lot of the same events, sharing food and drink, talking, thinking, and eventually making work together. In 1996, | was introduced to Speaking the Language of Spiders, G2) led by Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, probably the first web-based Indigenous artwork. | had already been dreaming of CyberPowWow, which would launch the next year. Soon after, | met Archer Pechawis, who enthusiastically embarked on the CyberPowWow adventure with me. In 1999, | met Jason Lewis, who became my primary collaborator. As we built AbTeC (Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace) and then the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, Our circle expanded. We made a concerted effort to be in conversation with Indigenous youth through our Skins Workshops in Indigenous Storytelling and Digital Media. More recently, we've been forging connections with Afrofuturists, some of whom are listed here. 1996 _Isi-pikiskwéwin-Ayapihkésisak [Speaking the Language of Spiders] by Cheryl LHirondelle, Anasiw MaskegonIskwew, and Joseph Naytowhow 1997 CyberPowWow by Nation to Nation

Dr. Charlotte Webb of Feminist Internet

This collection is made up of works that bring feminism, technology, and creative practices together to express new feminist imaginaries. The entries come in all forms—zines, > open-source radio, 6&3)VR experiences, 7) hypertext, @ science fiction stories, @=) interactive archives, human-Al conversations, podcasts, and reimagined voice assistants—© but they all entail speculations, visions, and the potential to bring about alternative realities. I’ve often thought the test of a great artwork comes in the form of two questions: First, does this work give you a sense of the artist(s)}—can you sense their presence? Second, does this work make you want to make or do something yourself? | can answer “yes” for all of these projects! When our communities are facing what can seem like insurmountable challenges and injustice, the act of making can provide a nourishing space to engage differently. Creativity and feminism are natural allies because they both have the power to bring about new ways of seeing, being, and doing. | am so grateful to all of these practitioners, who inspire the creative impulse and give me hope that there is no feminism—only possible feminisms—and no internet—only possible internets.

@) 1995 Cyberflesh Girlmonster by Linda Dement @) 1996 My Boyfriend Came Back from the War by Olia Lialina 1997 100 Anti-Theses by Old Boys Network 1999 — skinonskinonskin by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn 2013 VVVVVV by Faith Holland 2014 Conversations with Bina48 by Stephanie Dinkins 2014 ~— Feminist Principles of the Internet 2015 §Octavia’s Brood by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha 2015 = World White Web by Johanna Burai G35) 2017 — Feminist Internet 2017 ~+NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF) by Hyphen Labs 2018 | Wombs by Margherita Pevere 2019 Dream Babes 2.0 by Victoria Sin 2019 Howto Make a Feminist Alexa by Feminist Internet 2019 Radio Cosmica by Melissa Aguilar and Rosaura Rivera

2019 — Recoding Utopias: The Importance of Queer Spaces by Feminist Internet 2020 _ Black Trans Archive by Danielle Brathwaite Shirley 2020 Open Source Afro Hair Library by A.M. Darke

Cybernetics of Sex Melanie Hoff of School for Poetic Computation

Melanie Hoff is an artist and educator examining the role technology plays in social organization and reinforcing hegemonic structures. They are co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, the Cybernetics Library, and Soft Surplus.

This collection addresses cyberfeminism through the lens of sexual labor. In my art and teaching practices, | frequently refer to the “Cybernetics of Sex.” | define this as the way desirability politics exert a direct influence on who gets born. When certain communities are systematically devalued in both intimate and public spheres, this has an impact on whose lives are considered worthy of reproduction. There is a reproductive flow of social and political ideas through the reproduction of people. This is the sexual reproduction of ideas. Sexual labor is a place where alternative models can be explored—sex workers give a powerful kind of permission to please and be pleased in our personal and collective private truths. Sexual labor exists at the intersection of patriarchy, sex, and capitalism. In a society that so often denies and shames, sexual labor creates spaces of possibility for radical connection across sexual preference, gender expression, and platforms of exchange. Sex workers are at the forefront of technological innovation, though rarely credited the way male-dominated fields, like the military, routinely are. The passage of Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act/Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA/FOSTA) in 2018 marks a continuation of a culture that shadowbans and deplatforms sex workers, pushing them out of the very digital spaces they innovated and into unsafe contexts for their work. The same culture that tends to view sex work as exclusively exploitative is always ready to find new ways to exploit. Access to supportive online spaces is a

==> picture [483 x 734] intentionally omitted <==

----- Start of picture text -----
way of refusing harmful societal standards. Accessible, digital spaces that
do not censor or deplatform sex workers and that do not feed into models
of shame and stigma are vital to the formation of resilient networks of
solidarity and cybernetic intimacies.
1995 The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the
Mechanical Age by Allucquere Rosanne Stone
@5) 1996 Phone Sex is Cool, Chat-Lines as Superconductors by
Marcus Boon
G7 2000 Mistresses of Their Domain: How Female Entrepreneurs
in Cyberporn are Initiating a Gender Power Shift by
Kimberlianne Podlas
2003 — girlswholikeporno by Agueda Bann and Maria Llopis
2009 ~UKI by ShuLea Cheang
2013 ~~ Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the
Genesis of Glitch Body Politic by Legacy Russell
2013 = VVVVVV by Faith Holland
2015 Sluts ‘r us: Intersections of Gender, Protocol and Agency
in the Digital Age by Nishant Shah
2016 Buy Me Offline by Lindsay Dye
2016 Data Domination by Mistress Harley
33) 2017 ~~ Exotic Trade by Tabita Rezaire
2017 ‘Hackers of Resistance (HoRs)
2018 Code Societies by Melanie Hoff
2018 = Red Umbrella by Melissa Mariposa
2018 Sex and African Feminisms—utilising the Power of
Digital Technologies by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
2018 ~— Touchy-Feely Tech by Alice Stewart
2019 Daddy Residency by Nahee Kim
2019 Feminist Data Manifest-No by Marika Cifor, Patricia
Garcia, TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland,
Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffmann,
Niloufar Salehi, and Lisa Nakamura
2019 ~— Hacking//Hustling by Danielle Blunt and Melissa
Gira Grant
23
----- End of picture text -----

2020 — E-Viction by Veil Machine (Niko Flux, Sybil Fury, and Empress Wu)

Cyborgrrrls

Constanza Pifia and Melissa Aguilar

Melissa Aguilar is a graphic designer, visual artist, and researcher from Costa Rica based in Mexico City. She has a master’s degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM-FAD) and is a member of ICOM Costa Rica and the technofeminist collective Cyborgrrrls. Constanza Pifia Pardo is an electronic artist and founder of Cyborgrrrls: TechnoFeminist Meeting. She is interested in hardware hacking, softcircuits, DIY antennas, handicraft synths, ancestral technologies, and electronic wizardry. Her work explores noise as a sound, political, and cultural phenomenon. Cyborg tentacles spread through the net of Cyborgrrris, reaching out to a collection of projects selected in relation to affects and collaborations between 2017 and 2019. We have created this selection to highlight the research and offerings of a group of people from cyberfeminism and technofeminism ranging from net art and DIY gynecology to digital rights. Some of the authors in our collection have been part of the Cyborgrrrls Technofeminist Meeting in previous years, such as Klau Chinche (Klau Kinky), Laboratorio de Interconectividades, 405 Paula Pin, G32 Hibridas y Quimeras, Tabita Rezaire, G5 and Morehshin Allahyari. Other additions include authors with whom we will collaborate in the near future or who inspire our work.

We also included two sub-projects of Cyborgrrrls: CyborgCinema G4 and Cyborg Multiversity. = The first is a video showcase event for short films, music videos, experimental film dealing with feminisms, cyborgs, technology, and gender. It is an itinerant screening that can travel independent of the meeting and happen in different places. Cyborg Multiversity is a monthlong program of collective and open learning in various independent spaces throughout Mexico City. Womxn and non-binary people teach workshops on a wide range of subjects, from open-source 24

coding and witchcraft to self-defense and more. Through the workshops, we not only spread significant knowledge but also provide useful tools for contemporary survival in one of the most violent cities in Latin America for womxn and for dissidents. 2000 —s=iI.K.U. by Shu Lea Cheang 2005 —s@TIC-as by Sula Batsu @32) 2011 ~~ Freakabolic by Paula Pin 2013 = Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey by Klau Chinche (Klau Kinky) 2014 ~— El Laboratorio de Interconectividades [The Interconnectivity Lab] 2015 ~~ Becoming Machine-Witch-Plant: Gynaecological TransHackFeminism and Joyful Dystopia by Aniara Rodado 2015 Open Source Estrogen: A Manifesto by Mary Maggic @3) 2017 ~~ Exotic Trade by Tabita Rezaire 2017 ~—~Hibridas y Quimeras [Hybrids and Chimeras] by Piaka Roela, Libertad Figueroa, Mabe Frati, Corazon de Robota, and Itzel Noyz 2018 Manifiesto por Algoritmias HackFeministas [Manifesto for HackFeminist Algorithms] by Liliana Zaragoza Cano, Natasha Felizi, and Ana Cristina Joaquim 2018 — Tormenta: dialogos feministas para las libertades y autocuidados digitales [Storm: Feminist Dialogues for Digital Liberties and Self-Care Strategies] by Alex Arguelles, Estrella Soria, Irene Soria Guzman, Juliana Guerra, Liliana Zaragoza Cano, and Samantha Camacho 2019 CyborgCinema by Cyborgrrrls 2019 Fuck the Soundcheck! by Dominique Pelletier, Constanza Piha, Gaia Leandra, Melissa Aguilar, and Hibridas y Quimeras 2019 Multiversidad Cyborg by Cyborgrrris 2019 Physical Tactics for Digital Colonialism by Morehshin Allahyari 2019 Radio Cosmica by Melissa Aguilar and Rosaura Rivera (Hackie) 29

Ephemera Forever

Cornelia Sollfrank of Old Boys Network

Cornelia Sollfrank is an artist, researcher, and educator living in Berlin. As a pioneer of internet art, Sollfrank built her reputation with two central projects: the net.art generator (a web-based art-producing “machine”) and Female Extension (her famous hack of the first competition for internet art). Recent publications include The Beautiful Warriors: Technofeminist Practice in the 21st Century ~~(minorcompositions.org),~~ Aesthetics of the Commons ~~(diaphanes.net),~~ and Fix My Code (with Winnie Soon) ~~(eeclectic.de)—all~~ open-access.

This collection very much refers to works that are part of my own practice as an artist and researcher. Since my early involvement in Cyberfeminism in the mid-1990s, | have had a special interest in the relationship between gender and technology. Inspired by Judy Wajcman’s dictum that technology is never neutral and that it is a highly gendered field, © | explored the technological underground—the hacker scene, where gender imbalance was and remains extreme. @ The frustrating findings of such ethnographic research led me to artistic interventions in the field, the aim of which was to manipulate the dynamics that allow for social hacks and the spread of false information, G73) G75) or to add complexity to black-and-white situations. Another strand of my work is the building of contexts for technofeminist collaboration and exchange. The founding of the Old Boys Network (57) took place in the tradition of the early feminist artist collectives frauen-und-technik (women-and-technology, 1992-94) and -Innen (1994-96) and eventually inspired the recent activities of the technofeminist research group #purplenoise, which is dedicated to social media interventions.

© 1991 Feminism Confronts Technology by Judy Wajcman 1997 100 Anti-Theses by Old Boys Network 1997 ~The First Cyberfeminist International by Old Boys Network, Susanne Ackers, Babeth, Ulrike Bergermann,

Josephine Bosma, Shu Lea Cheang, Vali Djordjevic, Olga Egerova, Marina Grzinic, Sabine Helmers, Kathy Rae Huffman, Margarethe Jahrmann, Vesna Jankovic, Verena Kuni, Vesna Manojlovic, Nikolina Manojlovic, Diana McCarty, Alla Mitrofanova, Ingrid Molnar, Mathilde Mupe, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Helene von Oldenburg, Natalja Pershina, Daniela Alina Plewe, Corrine Petrus, Julianne Pierce, Claudia Reiche, Tamara Rouw, Rasa Smite, Cornelia Sollfrank, Debra Solomon, Josephine Starrs, Kerstin Weiberg, and Ina Wudtke 1997 Old Boys Network by Susanne Ackers, Cornelia Sollfrank, Ellen Nonnenmacher, Vali Djordjevic, and Julianne Pierce 1999 Next Cyberfeminist International by Old Boys Network, Alla Mitrofanova, Barbara Rechbach, Barbara Thoens, Caroline Bassett, Claudia Reiche, Cornelia Sollfrank, Corrine Petrus, Faith Wilding, Gudrun Teich, Helene von Oldenburg, Ingrid Hoofd, Irina Aristarkhova, Janine Sack, Josephine Bosma, Mare Tralla, Maren Hartmann, Maria Fernandez, Marieke van Santen, Nat Muller, Pam Skelton, Rachel Baker, Rasa Smite, Rena Tangens, Shu Lea Cheang, Stephanie Wehner, Sunchana Spirovan, Susanne Ackers, Ursula Biemann, Veronica Engler, Vesna Jankovic, and Yvonne Volkart 2001 ~+Very Cyberfeminist International by Old Boys Network, Action Tank, Andrea Sick, Ania Corcilius, Anne Hilde Neset, Annette Schindler, Ariane Brenssell, Barbara Thoens, Bildwechsel, Britta Bonifacius, Christina Goestl, Cindy Gabriela Flores, Claude Draude, Claudia Reiche, Corinna Bath, Cornelia Sollfrank, Elisabeth Strowick, Faith Wilding, Feminist Indymedia Austria, Galerie Helga Broll, Genderchangers, Helene von Oldenburg, Irina Aristarkhova, Isabelle Massu, Janine Sack, Jill Scott, Jutta Weber, Lauren Cornell, Laurence Rassel, Les Pénélopes, Lina Dzuverovic-Russell, Lola Castro, 27